Recently bats have been associated with the emergence of diseases, both as reservoirs for several new viral diseases in humans and other animals and, in the northern Americas, as hosts for a devastating fungal disease that ...

White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a new disease of bats that has devastated populations in eastern North America. Infection with the fungus, Geomyces destructans, is thought to increase the time bats spend out of torpor during ...

Emerging infectious diseases pose an important threat to wildlife. While established protocols exist for combating outbreaks of human and agricultural pathogens, appropriate management actions before, during, and after the ...

White-nose syndrome (WNS) is a mysterious condition affecting populations of hibernating bats in the northeastern US. Little is known about its physiological effects on bats and no intervention has so far been proposed to ...

Field studies of use of torpor by heterothermic endotherms suffer from the lack of a standardized threshold differentiating torpid body temperatures (T_b) from normothermic T_b's. This threshold can be more readily observed ...

Understanding animal mating systems is an important component of their conservation, yet the precise mating times for many species of bats are unknown. The aim of this study was to better understand the details and timing ...

Torpor is an adaptation for energy conservation employed by many species of small-bodied endotherms. However, surprisingly little is known regarding proximate factors influencing day-to-day variation in torpor expression ...

Hibernation physiology and energy expenditure have been relatively well studied in large captive hibernators, especially rodents, but data from smaller, free-ranging hibernators are sparse. We examined variation in the ...

Animal personality or temperament refers to individual differences in behaviour that are repeatable over time and across contexts. Personality has been linked to life-history traits, energetic traits and fitness, with ...

The potential benefits of physiology for conservation are well established and include greater specificity of management techniques, determination of cause–effect relationships, increased sensitivity of health and disturbance ...